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'Deathbed selfies' column removed by Guardian

Ravi Somaiya

The British newspaper The Guardian on Monday removed from its website a controversial column by one of its writers that discussed a woman's use of Twitter to chronicle her struggle with cancer.

In removing it, The Guardian cited an investigation into the column.

The writer, Emma Gilbey Keller, had focused on the Twitter account and blog of Lisa Bonchek Adams, a mother of three who is being treated for stage four breast cancer. Adams has been writing about it regularly, saying that she wanted to do "as much as I can for as long as I can."

The Guardian removed the column, published last Wednesday, on the same day that a column on the same topic by Emma Keller's husband, Bill Keller, was published in The New York Times, prompting a resurgence in the controversy.

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Emma Keller questioned Adams' documenting her illness in a public forum. "Are her tweets a grim equivalent of deathbed selfies, one step further than funeral selfies?" Emma Keller wrote, referring to self-taken images that are popular online.

A wave of online criticism developed from Adams' followers and others, accusing Emma Keller of mischaracterising Adams. Emma Keller was also criticised for publishing private correspondence with Adams as part of her column.

Adams, who lives in Connecticut and is receiving treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in Manhattan, said on Twitter that Emma Keller's column contained inaccuracies. "I'm quite perplexed and concerned," she wrote. "Misses everything I'm trying to do. Stunned. Saddened."

The column by Bill Keller, the former executive editor of The New York Times, tried to incorporate Adams' situation into a broader discussion about end-of-life care. By Monday afternoon, with the issue generating debate on the Internet, Margaret Sullivan, The Times' public editor, weighed in with her own analysis. She wrote that the two columns could be seen by critics as "a sort of double-pronged slam, greater together than the sum of their parts." After weighing positive and negative reader response, and engaging in a dialogue with Bill Keller, she concluded that "there are issues here of tone and sensitivity."

Bill Keller told Sullivan that "some readers have misread my point, and some - the most vociferous - seem to believe that anything short of an unqualified 'right on, Lisa!' is inhumane or sacrilegious." Neither his column, nor his wife's, he said, "was a 'slam' of Lisa Adams or her choices."

In an email, Bill Keller expanded on comments he made to Sullivan. "The most perverse aspect - of many - is the idea that Emma, who endured her own double mastectomy in 2012, is somehow lacking in empathy for victims of breast cancer."

He said it was sad that two serious debates - "living with a terminal disease in our hyper-transparent world" and "patients' choice of response to terminal illness" were being "drowned out by a tide of political correctness."

Emma Keller declined to comment.

The Guardian said only that it had removed her column while conducting an investigation. But a person at The Guardian with knowledge of the process said that the column's tone and substance had been under review since it was published, and that its removal was not related to the publication of Bill Keller's column on Monday.

Adams did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment Monday. "I'm in middle of intense radiation sessions this week," she wrote on Twitter late Monday. "I'm not doing interviews. Or even thinking about them. I am focusing on treatment."

Earlier in the day Adams said that there was a bright side to the debate over the Kellers' columns. "One thing so great about today," she wrote. "I am alive to see a diff(erence) I could make in discussion of metastatic cancer. And will be here for more."